Born 1981 in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, Anouk Kruithof is an artist working in Mexico City. Her multilayered, interdisciplinary approach encompasses photography, sculpture, installation, artist-books, text, performance, video, animation, websites and interventions in the public domain.

Kruithof’s work is an investigation into the online representation of urgent societal themes. Over the past few years she collected circulating images related to issues like privacy, government surveillance, pollution and climate change. Kruithof subjects these to critical scrutiny by extracting existing imagery from the digital sphere, and translating the photo- graphs into her own idiosyncratic three-dimensional visual idiom.

Kruithof is interested in how the human psychological condition is shifting in unstable times of systematic control, stress and chaos in the technologically mediated world. She attempts to map states of mind in a post-internet society, manifesting invisible relationships in physical form and inviting new connections and meanings to arise.

The work of Kruithof is a refreshingly original contribution to contemporary photography. Approaching the medium from a great variety of angles, her works are equally versatile, ranging from photographs, sculptures and installations to videos, animations, publications and performances. A common denominator is her fascination for our complex relationship with the physical environment in the digital age. Reality as depicted on our screens consists largely of processed and constructed images that, in Kruithof’s view, have lost their integrity. At the same time we readily embrace the photographic medium as a means of promotion and self-validation. With her work Anouk Kruithof bridges the gap between the tangible world and the way it manifests itself online.

Anouk Kruithof received the public prize of the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunstprijs in 2016, the Meijburg Art Commission in 2015 and won the Charlotte Köhler Prize in the Netherlands in 2014. She has also received an Infinity Award of the International Center for Photography in New York in 2012 and the Jury Grand Prize of Festival International de Mode et de Photographie in Hyères in 2011.

On her publishing platform stresspress.biz she presents the 11 artist-books she published so far including: Automagic published by Editorial RM and stresspress.biz, Neutral published by stresspress.biz and galerie Jo van de Loo, The Bungalow published by Onomatopee Eindhoven; Untitled (I’ve taken too many photos / I’ve never taken a photo) self-published (stresspress.biz); Pixel-stress published by RVB-books Paris; A head with wings, published by LBM Saint Paul, USA, Lang zal ze leven / Happy birthday to you, self-published; The daily exhaustion, published by KODOJI-press Baden, Switzerland; Playing Borders, this contemporary state of mind, published by Revolver publishing by VVV, Berlin; Becoming Blue published by Revolver publishing by VVV, Het Zwarte gat; The black hole published by Episode Publishers, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Kruithof is also co-creator, director and jury member of the new Anamorphosis Prize, which will award $10,000, no strings attached, to the creator of the best self-published photo-book from the previous year. The prize was launched for the first time in spring 2015 and celebrated 3 editions so far.